251–260 of 359 posts
How come that we try to create AI with NNs and billions of funding, but we don't pay the same amount of attention towards understanding the foundations of our own thinking?
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Personally I don't like seeing it as a regular illness. Yes it's a complication to how society wants people to function. Work 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Go to school 6 hours a day 5 days a week. Be productive in that time frame. Keep focus on given tasks. You can take medication to adhere to these artificial expectations on how an individual should function within society. Or you can live in a way that matches your…
> You can take medication to adhere to these artificial expectations on how an individual should function within society. Or you can live in a way that matches your natural behavior and capabilities. What if the behaviour causes pain to you? What if it's the cause of your anxiety, depression, loneliness, addiction? Because at a certain point, you need to admit that it's not that you need a life that matches your capa…
I'm suspicious of how often ADHD is diagnosed, and the subjectivity and lack of detailed mechanistic explanations. More study is required. I have little experience with where the current youth/teen culture is at, regarding diagnoses, and mental illness.
Behaviours that I attribute to ADHD have caused me a lot of suffering, and contributed to me being less reliable than I would like w.r.t deadlines, and personal commitments. On the other hand, I'm funny, and very creative. Like painfully creative. Like it's a goddamn joy/pain to be exploding with ideas and interests all the time. Going down rabbit holes, etc.
My current medication is quite helpful, although I experienced very bad side-effects to the first medications I took 20 years ago. This led me to avoid medication for about a decade and a half, to my detriment. Medication has not been a cure-all, and has come with some physical side-effects that I choose to tolerate. With age, I've developed coping strategies, but it's still a daily (weekly?) struggle. This is where accepting yourself -- flaws and all comes in. That tension between personal-improvement, and personal kindness / acceptance.
I'm reliable enough to get by, but I think perhaps I would have been a super-star. Still trying, I guess?
All that said, I don't know if I would get rid of it. The easy creativity, just-do-it default, and humour are part of who I am and want to be. That said, the detriments have absolutely been real and contributed to my own suffering. Although, with age, I feel as though I've been through the crucible and am basically unstoppable. I just don't know exactly where I'm going. I am so much tougher, mentally, than I was. Suffering is not all bad, as long as it's not catastrophic, or inescapable.
So .. uh .. yeah. YMMV.
I have ADD. Not ADHD; I'm almost never hyperactive. I do, however, hyperfocus on anything and everything, to the point that it's caused severe problems to my career, relationships, and personal life. I'm nearly always hyperfocused on something, and I rarely have control over what that is. I'll forget to eat, sleep, talk to people, or really do anything else for several days at a time when it gets bad. Fortunately, ov…
ADD is just old terminology. You have ADHD, and you should read up on some updated science cause you got some very weird, very wrong ideas about your own condition. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33549739/
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Being short can be a disorder. It just so happens that picking fruit from tall trees by itself isn't considered by society to be a very necessary & important activity, while "social, school, or work functioning" is. Adults who remain too short to do things that are considered necessary & important for adults to do would almost certainly have a negative disorder of some kind. That criteria sentence from the CDC websit…
If the DSM-V definition is overly broad, and the truth behind ADHD is different, is that not fairly alarming? Currently 9.4% of children are diagnosed with ADHD[1], but we don't diagnose 9.4% of the population as having a disorder on merit of being very tall or very short. In fact, with ADHD, we're also not also counting the opposite of ADHD as a disability, so we're counting a HUGE swathe of the lower end of the spe…
Not every disorder has a double-sided spectrum of behavior. What's the opposite of Bipolar?
I don't doubt that diagnosis is hard and error-prone, and I don't think any honest scientist claims they have firm explanations for every aspect of ADHD and its treatments. It's an ongoing field of research.
But 70 - 80% of children quickly show improvements in response to stimulant therapy very quickly. That's worth a try for such a debilitating condition that sees a third of its patients drop out of high school and 5 - 10% graduate college at all. ADHD's heritability is insanely high at ~80%. None of your tenuous data-free assertions really changes the good science that has been established. We're not talking about controversial stuff here like SSRIs that barely beats placebo. You're going to have to do more than poke at some gaps to twist ADHD into the wholly different "social construct" theory you have even less actual evidence for.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080811195643.h...
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The person you are replying to is well aware that it's a bad thing, that's why they pointed it out.
Maybe they have a hard time paying attention to the text? Or does ADD affect reading? I'm not really sure how it works
- They could
- Sometimes it does
- "It" doesn't work a single way, which is why there are so many different opinions of how to look at it :)
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Personally I don't like seeing it as a regular illness. Yes it's a complication to how society wants people to function. Work 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Go to school 6 hours a day 5 days a week. Be productive in that time frame. Keep focus on given tasks. You can take medication to adhere to these artificial expectations on how an individual should function within society. Or you can live in a way that matches your…
I have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and I feel the same way about it. It's not an illness, it's simply a maladaptation to the kind of world we live in. Most milder mental disorders are probably like this; it doesn't make any sense from the evolutionary point of view that a significant proportion of the population would have largely genetic trait that is only harmful in all situations. It's just that traits…
This. In tribal times it was an asset. A few individuals that sleep till noon and stay up all night? Who cares. When the tribe got attacked by others or wild animals they could save 100-150 peoples lives.
The part I hate most today is that if you relate to a video on ADHD/DID/Depression/Schizophrenia/etc, you will be fed the content until you convince yourself you have a “character trait”. That’s a serious problem with long term effects on society. I’m very sure I sit somewhere on the spectrum and have depressive disorder markers as well. But the last thing I want to do is to promote these traits. I am not proud of th…
And who would benefit from that change in classification or public opinion? Health care providers, because why would e.g. the NHS or health insurance pay for therapy or medication or anything else that would help you for something that is "just" a character trait?
My girlfriend got diagnosed with ADHD in her 30's, but only because there was a very short-lived and quickly shut down (due to cost) program at the NHS for adult ADHD diagnosis. If she hadn't had that, she would never have been able to get a diagnosis or the relevant medication.
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That viewpoint makes the same strawman argument: > is part of the natural variation in how human brains work, and ... it's a category error to think of it as a malfunction to be repaired No! No one is saying that everyone at one end of the spectrum has a disorder. It is specifically not a category error because the term "disorder" is not applied based on the variability, but rather based on whether the variation mean…
But that exact same person in a different time, place, or career, might not be disrupted. I wasn't diagnosed until recently. The compounding of increasing demands at home with my family and at work, partially due to pandemic side effects lead to it. A hunter gatherer might actually gain benefits from it. Its like saying someone who is very tall has a disorder because it makes them a poor horse jockey, or a very short…
If you are not disrupted, you do not have a disorder. Psychiatric medicine is about you and how you feel about it. If you feel like you can make a life change and have it not impact you, great! Do that.
> A hunter gatherer might actually [...]
That's nice, but it's not what you are and not how your life currently looks. So why do you think it's relevant? I don't understand this reference.
> Its like saying someone who is very tall has a disorder because it makes them a poor horse jockey
It is not, because this is about mental quirks that impact your life to such an extent that you feel you cannot adequately live it.
The diagnostic criteria for mental illness is, to simplify, that an aspect of your mind causes significant problems. If it doesn’t, as the author’s attention seems not to, then you probably shouldn’t be diagnosed with the disorder. Comparing yourself, when you have mild characteristics in common with a diagnosis and then saying it’s not so bad is perhaps not so helpful to those who do struggle with it.
Are you implying that the author did not get a professional diagnosis and is merely comparing himself to people who have ADHD? When I was diagnosed with ADHD, the disorder did cause me significant problems. Over the years I have managed to do a lot better, where I can now relate to the state the author is in (just the ADHD part, I do not suffer from depression). I would now say it’s not so bad too.
If they did, then they felt it was an issue at the time. Clearly they don't anymore, so it has stopped being a disorder.
> Over the years I have managed to do a lot better
Great! So you've fixed it. Now you don't have a disorder anymore, just a quirk of the mind.